SOURCE: "Eddie Guest: Just Glad," in The American Mercury, Vol. VI, No. 23, November 1925, pp. 322-27.

[In the following parody of an idealized biography of Guest, Cline alludes to Guest's verse in order to create his own rendition of Guest's life.]

Doty's drug-store has spawned prolifically in the last thirty years. Fecundated by Henry Ford, it has become a chain of stores from end to end of Detroit. The old place at Sibley and Clifford streets, where Mr. Doty himself used to compound prescriptions for our mothers, is probably gone now. Mr. Doty travels in Europe and vicarious hands paste the labels on the bottles. There is one-way traffic in Clifford street, and the brick residences that once bordered the adjacent avenues, each sedately aloof in its iron-fence enclosure, have given way to garages and motor salesrooms and rearing efficiency apartments.

It was in Cass avenue, five blocks north of Sibley, that I spent my childhood, and it was on Doty's marble that I spilled my first ice-cream soda. Summer and Winter, green and white, the years passed. When it was July Cass avenue would be the sleepiest street in Detroit. Once a morning John Blessed's grocery wagon would jog somnolently up the street under the maples. Blessed's delivery boy would let me ride with him now and then, and from his seat I learned how to drive a horse. At Doty's I would get off and have a soda. When it was January the sporting folk of Detroit, the horsemen, the noblesse, would have cutter races down Cass avenue from the Central High-school to Sibley. How merrily the snow flew! We children of the neighborhood would gather at the finish line and watch there until our paws got stiff with cold in our mittens and the hot baked potatoes that Ma put in our pockets had become quite frigid. Then we would go into Doty's and have a soda.

Who were we all, in those halcyon days? Philip Worcester and his sister Mabel; God knows where they may be now. And Hudson Pirie. Dear old friend! He and my sister and I were the whole membership of the White Swan Club, named for the laundry: Hudson was president, and Elizabeth was vice-president, and I was ex-president. And Hallie Burton and . . . and who besides? They are all grown, those brave fine children; they have carried their burdens with a grin; America is the richer and the world the wiser for them. As I muse with a tear in my heart the music of Eddie Guest comes singing:

Youth is the golden time of life, and this battered
old heart of mine
Beats fast to the march of its old-time joys, when
the sun begins to shine.

Eddie Guest! And he, in those sweet far years that are now but tenuous memories, tinted and fragrant—years when Ma and Pa and Granpa and my seven sisters and brothers did a heap o' livin' in that little gray brick cottage that shall always be home to me—he, in those years, worked at the soda fountain in Doty's.

II

From soda fountain to Parnassus, from potwasher to Poet of the Plain People, Poet of America indeed, whose books—I have the authority of his publishers, Reilly and Lee, for it—have sold more than a million copies! Never has Providence wrought its wonders in stranger and more romantic fashion. John Masefield, to be sure, swept out Luke O'Connor's barroom at one time; and Knut Hamsun, as we all know, was conductor on a Chicago street-car in the days before his triumph. But where is there another record of a soda fountain clerk becoming immortal! It is a story of indomitable will, the story of Eddie Guest. It never could have been written had there not burned in the soul of the man the challenging conviction that, as he phrases it, "No one is beat till he quits":

Fate can slam him and bang him around,
And batter his frame till he's sore,
But she never can say that he's downed
While he bobs up serenely for more.

We ignorant children, of course, discerned no least glare of celestial fire in the dark-haired, dreamful lad who mixed our chocolate and soda water and took our nickels. It remained for a humble book-keeper employed by the Detroit Free Press to be the first to recognize in Eddie those qualities of mind and spirit which have made him, as he is, the outstanding figure in our national literature—qualities

That all men picture when they see
The glorious banner of the free.

This was a book-keeper who, even in that Golden Age of Rum, preferred his ice-cream soda to his growler of bock, and regularly dropped in at Doty's on his way home, weary after a hard day of white collar toil.

One can imagine the scene. The book-keeper, honest fellow, sucking at his straw, twirling idly on his stool, gazing curiously at the industrious little shaver who polished the glasses on the other side of the counter. He was a self-made man, a Christian no doubt—one who had made his way dauntlessly against all adversity; self-educated, leaning on no one for support. He had himself all the high qualities that he admired in the dark-haired, serious boy who worked so earnestly while other lads his age frittered away their time in frivolities. He was a master of the science of book-keeping.

"Eddie," he said, putting his glass down and meditatively wiping a drop of cream from his beard; "Eddie, son, what do you expect to make of yourself in life?"

And Eddie, without ceasing his toil, replied, "God grant me the strength to do some needed Service. I pray for wisdom to be Brave and True, and for the gift of Clear Vision, so that I may see the Deeper Purposes and the Finer Significances of the tasks that are set me. To be content to keep on in the station where God has put me, to do always a little more than I am paid for, to get early to the job and never leave until the rest are gone. I may never be famous, but I'll not leave any sign of wrong behind me when I pass out."

Up from his stool jumped the book-keeper, and he stretched a white hand across the marble to the laddie, and he vowed then and there that the first opening for an office boy in the business department of the Detroit Free Press should go to Edgar Albert Guest. Who was there to witness the scene? I myself cannot remember having been there. Mr. Doty was probably dozing in the back room. They were alone, Eddie and the book-keeper, in that solemn and historic moment.

The words that Eddie said were from the bottom of his great heart. In almost all his poems the echo of them sounds; particularly in the noble "Plea" that dignifies the pages of Poems of Patriotism. And the book-keeper's promise was fulfilled when, in 1895, Eddie went on the pay-roll of the Detroit Free Press. He has been there ever since, not now indeed as office boy, but as staff poet.

III

There are apple-trees and sand-lot baseball games and country roads and swimmin' holes in Eddie Guest's memory of his boyhood, but the bustle of the downtown streets is his principal heritage of dream from those days. He was born on August 20, 1881, in Birmingham, England, and his parents brought him to the land of the free when he was ten. Through the public schools he made his studious way. The family, it appears, was not opulent, and Eddie began to work after school hours as soon as he was able. In 1895, as we have seen, he mixed his last soda, polished his last glass, and went to the Free Press.

His duties at first were arduous. One of them was marking the baseball scores on the bulletin-board in front of the Free Press Building. Attentively the serious little fellow studied the jostling morons who waited through the innings, and no doubt he wondered now and then how it would feel to be himself the hero they applauded. "Promotion," he told himself, "will come to me if I work unselfishly in my employer's interests. If I think less of what is in my envelope and more of my opportunity to serve, I will get there!" And sure enough, after two years of diligent and unwearying effort as office boy in the business department, Eddie was given his reward—promotion to the post of office boy in the editorial rooms!

Eddie's thoughts on this occasion were to become, later, that ode to "Promotion" which has inspired so many American youths to ever more assiduous toil:

Promotion comes to him who tries
Not solely for a selfish prize,
But day by day and year by year
Holds his employer's interests dear. . . .
The man who would the top attain
Must demonstrate he has a brain.

But not yet was that epiphany of beauty in Eddie's heroic spirit. He still had no idea of poetry. He confronted instead the problem of demonstrating that he was a useful lad, of winning still another promotion in another two years. Indeed, he told himself, I may even sometime be made a reporter! And so he buckled into his new job.

Craps he eschewed, it would appear; the cigarettes and the profanities and the viciousness of the other newspaper office boys never seem to have smirched him. He kept the paste pots full, he purveyed caramels for the switchboard gal, he saw that there was always an abundance of copy-paper on the desks. Early and late he worked; he did the tasks of two, of six, of a dozen ordinary office boys. And his joy can be easily imagined when one afternoon the editor summoned him and gripped his hand and said, "Eddie, I've been watching your career. Your intelligence and your devotion demand greater opportunities. Here's your chance, boy! You are promoted!"

And so, just as the Nineteenth Century which had cradled him was yielding place to the Twentieth which was destined to immortalize him, Eddie found himself exchange editor of the Free Press.

'The exchange desk! A meaningless phrase to those who have never helped in the building of the daily paper!" exclaims Mr. R. Marshall, his official biographer, in A Little Book About the Poet of the Plain People. "Every daily newspaper has an exchange desk. In fact many of them haven't much else! But on the big dailies, the man who sits all day in a four-by-six room, completely surrounded by wave upon wave of printed sheets, from the Boston Transcript to the Wahoo Bugle—he is the man who looks at the world through wideangle lenses. Across the desk of the exchange editor sweeps the flood of the world's opinion, the sum total of the world's woe, the tinkling brooks of the world's joys. To him come the banker and the burglar, the women of high and low degree. To him," Mr. Marshall continues with jolly alliteration, "come the poet and the plunderer, musicians and murderers, jokesmiths and junkers, prophets and perjurers. It is he who sees history in the making—to him is shown the panorama of the world's fight in the midst of the fighting."

It is the ordinary practice, on the half-dozen metropolitan newspapers to which I have yielded Service, to assign to the exchange desk men who can be spared with least detriment from the work of writing news. But the Free Press, no doubt, was an unusual institution; and so we find Eddie clipping and pasting and studying through those wide-angle lenses the panorama of the world's fight.

It was here, on the exchange desk, that he first burst into song. The golden bell sounded, the finger of eternity anointed his temples, he leaned his ear to the clarion call, he discerned for the first time the throb of the heart of the great American people: that audience which he was to make so completely and so significantly his own, "the plain folk who sit in front of base-burners, who wear overalls, and pay their grocery bills on Saturday nights, and say grace at meals, and stick up for the under-dog, and fish for trout in brooks."

Mr. Marshall in his careful way records the moment. "A poetry microbe wriggled out from between one of Marse Henry Watterson's virile editorials and bit Eddie Guest good and proper. Eddie started to write verse and more verse, and those verses that got into print were read and were then cut out and preserved in family albums."

But who first saw the flare of the levin, who bated his breath, who set eyes on that first epochal poem, while the shy lad, its creator, kicked his heels in embarrassment? Mr. Marshall does not say. But it is not difficult to picture the scene.

Back to Eddie the gray-haired, scholarly copy-reader hands the poem, with a faint smile. "Well . . . it does rhyme, in places, doesn't it?" he comments; reluctant but stern in the integrity of his own understanding. "Eddie, whatever made you think you could write poetry? Stick to your shears and paste-pot, old man. You'll get to be a good newspaper man yet."

So into Eddie's pocket went the firstling of his genius, rejected. With eyes downcast he lingered a moment, the everlasting poet on the drear threshold of derision, until he could control his emotions enough to mutter an abashed "Thanks!" Then into the corridor he groped his way; and there, ah! there at last the tears came, storming down his cheeks. Was this the end? Was this denial all he had struggled to achieve? Could he never write those poems that were already beginning to flower in his heart, poems that would leave the simple hearts of men gladder when he had gone: poems that would memorialize the goodness of Ma and Pa, the joys of the plain and wholesome grub that the missus prepares for one, the nobleness of toil, the nearness of God and the transcending glory of Yankee Doodledom? Even as he wept he felt the songs in his spirit too wildly sweet to be hushed, a paean of hope and courage renewed that swelled in a tumultuous diapason.

"I will!" he cried, his eyes shining, his fist clenching. "They may say that it can't be done, but I for one am not convinced until I try it! They scoff at me, they jeer! But I shall buckle in with a grin and win!"

And he did. It is in Eddie's own words that we have the inner, spiritual story of what Mr. Marshall has but hinted at, and of what I have tried in my lame way to revivify: the poem "It Couldn't Be Done" from The Path to Home, whose periods are graven deep on the hearts of many a proudly aspiring, never faltering warrior of these splendid days:

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That "cannot be done," and you'll do it.

He did it, and it was not long before dawn spread her rosy wings over the burgeoning gardens of his life.

IV

There has been little development since then in Eddie Guest's literary style. From book to book, as the years pass, it runs along the same high plane of brave delicacy. From the crest of the wave his genius sprang full-formed to life. One reads the lyrics of Heap o' Livin, the first book of his poetry brought out by Reilly and Lee, in 1916, and one finds them exactly as sweet and juicy as the pieces in All That Matters, published in 1922. They are the same in style and in theme; his particular genius was mature in its first manifestation; it lisped never, it chanted full-throated. Yet for a little while after his beginnings in beauty Eddie continued a humble private in the cohorts of the Free Press.

From the exchange desk he graduated to the position of police reporter. Mr. Marshall lets us see him as he was in those remote days. "The crime reporter is the young man who knows all the policemen in town, who can point out the dope-fiends as they pass on the street, who wears a badge that lets him inside the lines at the big fires, who sits with the lawyers at the murder trials and who plays dominoes with the night chief when they're both doing 'the dog watch' in the small hours of the morning. The crime reporter knows the side of life where the seams are. And that, too, is a good experience for one who would school himself in the humanities."

I remember myself the reporters' room in the old Detroit Police Headquarters. We did not in my time play dominoes; we played poker, and the drawers of the rickety desks were filled with packs of greasy cards and chips. I remember the walls pasted thick with lickerish pictures from the Police Gazette; I remember the spittoons, the dirt, the jovial obscenities of the cops. And as I muse I find it incredible almost that Eddie, after this compulsory proximity to nastiness and crookedness and vice, could have preserved so chaste and unsullied the gentle ideals of his childhood: I am more and more amazed by the fact that he has yet to write "a line that father had to skip when he read to the family."

But he did not have to languish many years in that grotesquely uncongenial atmosphere. Presently the Free Press began to publish a short column of his poetry once a week, under the caption of "Chaff." And not long after that, as Mr. Marshall says, "they took Eddie off the crime beat and ordered him to be funny for a column every day." Again .. . he did it.

A poem a day! Perhaps his average was not, at first, so high as that. Yet in the decade up to 1910, so great was his facility, so indomitable his persistence, that he turned out some 3,650 poems. And so the time came when he determined to get out a book. Like Whitman, he was his own publisher. He produced a volume called Home Rhymes, for which his brother Harry set type in the attic of their house. The edition ran to 800 copies.

Two years later 730 new poems had accumulated and the Guest boys made another book—Just Glad Things—of which they printed 1,500 copies, In 1914 still another batch of 730 songs was on hand, and a third book was projected. But here the Rotary Club of Detroit intervened. Was not this a poet indeed, this slender, serious youth with the frank smile, who could dash off a poem a day? And poetry, too, that a red-blooded, high-powered Rotarían could understand: a poet who hymned in his swinging way "the peaceful warriors of trade," a poet who extolled the deliciousness of raisin pie in strophes one could sing to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":

There are pies that start the water circulatin' in
the mouth;
There are pies that wear the flavor of the warm
an' sunny South;
But for downright solid goodness that comes
drippin' from the sky
There is nothing quite the equal of a chunk o'
raisin pie.

So the alert minds of the Rotary Club intervened. Boy still, Eddie was summoned by those men of Vision. "We want Guest!" they shouted. They instructed him to make this new book in an edition big enough to go around. It must be of 3,500 copies! And the Rotarians themselves printed it so.

Noon, bright noon! Winds of popular acclaim swept away the mists, and Eddie, looking at his feet, saw them set firmly on the pinnacle! The sun hung above him. The world of his admirers bade it stand still, and it stood. It hangs above him to this day.

Came A Heap o' Livin', reaching eight editions in twenty months and a total circulation of 50,000. Since then seven more books have been published, and a first edition of 50,000 is considered conservative.

North, South, East and West the word winged its flaming way: Look to the heights! And the world looked, and there was Eddie: and the list of his poems in a quarter of a century numbered 9,125, and the number of his books in the homes of America was more than a million! The man who did it when they said it couldn't be done!

It remained for a prose-minded nomothete, a politician flaunting his efficiency-methods, a governor more interested in problems of reforestation, public schools and police protection than in the very essential spiritual thing without which all these mean nothing, to rob Eddie Guest of his final reward. In the Michigan legislature early in 1925 Representative Howell introduced Act No. 74, providing for the post of poet-laureate of the State, to be filled by the governor. Through both houses the act went without a murmur of dissent. For once, at the beckon of the Hon. Mr. Howell, both bodies of lawgivers turned from the crass needs of industrial and economic life to gaze a moment on Parnassus. There was never any doubt who would be honored as the first laureate of Michigan. The Kiwanis Club, eager to match the snobbish Rotarians, had already dubbed him such. It was admitted in press dispatches that Eddie was to have the job. And then the governor vetoed the act.

Why? Ah, why indeed! He explained idiotically that "such an office has no place in a republican form of government!"

V

But Eddie goes on. "Mr. Guest, as every one knows, writes a poem each day," marvels the reporter for the Telegram Mail who interviewed him last February. "Mr. Guest admits that some days it's a hard pull, but he often finds that the poem that has been the hardest to write and which he has thought his poorest has turned out to be the most popular of all."

He works without crutches. I well remember the consternation of a literary friend of mine, who, being in need of a rhyming dictionary, and being informed that Eddie had one in his office, knocked on his door and asked for it. I am afraid that Eddie spoke rather curtly to my friend. But it is not hard to understand what an affront the request may have seemed to him. He makes up all his own rhymes.

For some time, at least up to a year ago, he conducted once a week "The Edgar A. Guest's Young Verse Writers' Corner." Children were invited to submit their poems. Eddie undertook to correct them, and gave instructions in the art whose confines he himself has so largely expanded. He printed every day a number of the pieces sent to him, with comment. A prize, an autographed copy of one of his own books, was awarded weekly.

One week he printed a stanza by a nine-year old child in Bay City:

If I were a singer
I would sing a bonny song,
And all those who stopped to listen
Would be happy all day long.

His own emended version—infinitely more precise, more measured; the thumbprint of the master!—he printed at the same time:

If I were a singer
I'd sing a bonny song,
And all who stopped to hear
Would happy be, day-long!

Eddie went on to comment upon the form. He cited the iambic structure with alternating tetra—and trimeter verses: Ta dum ta dum ta dum ta dum, Ta dum ta dum ta dum. This, he said, "is a very good form, and we recommend it to all readers who aspire to write good verse."

Good verse, indeed! It is to far more than that that Eddie himself aspires. In the American Magazine he once published an intimate, sympathetic, encouraging little essay called "My Job as a Father." In it he revealed the real aspiration which, beneath and beyond his quest for beauty, dominates his life. It is not to be an artist at all! "To be the father of a great son is what I should call Success," he declares. There stands the man in a gesture.